Strangeness on a Plane
by robert.smith.9400984
Summary: Raven has a trio of strange encounters on the astral plane. The Doctor meets a girl with a wonderful story to tell him.


"… we might journey to the mall of shopping, or perform braiding manoeuvres upon each other's hair, or…" Starfire paused, concerned. Why, she wondered, was Raven covered in black flames? The effect was rather alarming. "You wish to be alone?" she guessed.

"How could you tell?" came the strained response.

# # # #

Starfire's irritating banalities faded away, and with them the room, the tower, reality; and Raven was at peace with the night and the stars. There were no maddening, eccentric aliens here. There was nothing here. There was only – Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos. The Centre.

There was something else here.

Raven became aware of a thing that manifested itself as – not a shape, not even a cloud – a congeries of colours which strobed violently in the astral midnight. Within them was a vastness vaster still than midnight.

This was her plane, her world, her Centre! How? What? Whence? Wherefore? She looked closer, scrutinizing the alien thing with her inner eye, allowing herself to see it in a way she could understand. Form swam out of formlessness.

With a chill of dread, she saw that the parti-coloured thing had thirteen faces.

"Who – who are you?" she croaked in terror.

"A perspicacious question. Who might you be, young lady?" it said.

Raven was in serious danger of falling out of the astral plane altogether. Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos… she found the Centre again; and with it, new sight.

The being staring haughtily at her was human-looking. But a human being it most certainly was not. Clad in many colours – in every colour – with angel-blonde hair crowning a cherubic face, it stood arrogantly in her astral plane as though it were a lord in its own demesne. It wore a badge: a snow-white cat that peered at her with ancient eyes.

"You have thirteen faces," she said accusingly. "Who are you? How did you find my Centre?"

"I didn't find it. I found myself, and my self happened to be here. I can assure you I won't be staying long – not that time has any meaning on the astral plane. Any amount of it can pass in the outside world whilst one is meditating." The being's expression of arrogant superiority became a touch quizzical. "Do you have a name?" it asked, more gently.

"Raven."

"Ah! 'Quoth the Raven, Nevermore'," it remarked, and chuckled. Raven had recovered herself enough to raise a scathing eyebrow.

"Like I haven't heard that before," she muttered, causing the vaster-than-midnight alien thing to harrumph somewhat petulantly.

"Well, I must be on my way," it said. "I'm still searching for myself, you see. And unless I can find myself, I'm afraid my self might cease to exist." The rainbow colours began to fade.

"But who are you?" Raven repeated in frustration. There came only silence in response.

There was nothing here. There was only Azarath, Metrion…

"MAIL CALL!"

Raven found herself lying in an undignified heap on the floor.

# # # #

Time has no meaning on the astral plane, so it was no time at all before Raven was there again. But the Raven who arrived was different. There was a dirty fire smouldering within her, making her unclean, so that the night and the stars could not offer the peace she craved so desperately now: her inner eye perceived that even here the huge blue midnight was stained blood-red, and the stars' distorted gleam made them look like evil sigils. A terrible change was coming, very soon, and she could not stop it, and when she returned from the Centre she would find that it had come a little closer. Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos had a mocking ring.

There was something else here.

This time it presented itself in a different aspect. There were no colours, no brightnesses, except (under the shadow of an astral fedora hat) two bright eyes of piercing steel grey. The spirit-form was small and shabby and grave, and it leaned upon its own mystery as though weary.

"Hello again," said Raven.

"I came to find you," said the other.

"Why?"

"We parted in haste, before."

"How?"

"Does it matter?"

"I need to know who you are. You have thirteen faces. There is only one I've heard of who is bigger than the night and has thirteen faces."

"Don't worry, I'm not him."

"I know. What do you want with me?"

"You're a sorceress. That interests me. I meet them very rarely. Real ones, that is." The Rs rolled weirdly.

"You're not from my world at all, are you? I can tell."

The other was silent.

"I'm a sorceress because I'm half-demon," Raven whispered, forcing the words out into the silence. "My father was named Trigon by my people. He… he tricked my mother. Part of his power is in me, and – I don't have much time left. "

The midnight seemed a little redder, the echoing non-sounds at the fringe of hearing a little more like mocking laughter.

"And my friends are going to die because of me," she said in a voice smaller than she had ever used before.

"You are the conduit of his power? The means by which he will enter the world?"

"Yes."

"So what are you going to do about it?"

"There's nothing I can do."

"You can fight. Heroes fight evil; they win. Your father is evil, isn't he? And you're a hero. That's the way these things usually work."

"Have you ever tried fighting an all-powerful demon from outside space and time?" said Raven harshly, trying to kill her fear and confusion with a frost of sarcasm. The other gazed out at the red-dripping stars, seemingly with little interest.

"On occasion," it said.

"How?"

"When my people were young, we looked out at the universe and saw it was full of enemies. Irrationality, magic, superstition, the rule of gods and demons and witch-queens. So we made ourselves lords of time and changed the universe into a better one, ruled by reason. The witch-queens found that their spells had turned into clockwork parlour-tricks, so no-one would obey them any more, and they died. The gods fled from us into higher realms. The demons we permitted to destroy themselves. After that, when vampires came out of the first blackness to consume us, we detonated suns to burn them to nothing, and impaled the ones which survived on stakes the size of towers. So now there is nothing left that threatens us. No demons. No vampires. No sorceresses."

"But I'm not a lord of time! I'm just a teenage girl, and I'm alone. My people are all dead. I can't fight my father. I can't even run from him – I have nowhere left to go."

"You'll die, then," the other said absently, "and your world will be destroyed. It won't be the first time such things have happened, or the last."

Raven burned in a fire of rage that was not entirely her own, and fought with it, and mastered it (Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos…). The fire dripped down her face in the form of two hot beads.

"How can you care so little? My friends, the people who love me, the people I love – they're going to die, and there is nothing I can do to stop it from happening!"

"If you love them, don't let them die. Save them instead. It seems simple enough to me."

Raven sobbed, then found herself back in the darkness of her room. Waves were beating like clockwork on the rocks outside.

# # # #

And now, in a place where time had meaning, strange music wove between the jungle trees, and animals gathered under the shadow of the canopy, drawn to the sound despite their fear of man – for after all, the creature who was playing it was not really a man, no matter what he looked like on the outside.

The Doctor sighed, and put the violin down with an abrupt clang. The novelty of it was wearing off, and besides, he felt curiously troubled.

Around him, the fallen stones of the ruined temple suggested a way to lose his blues. Throwing away an unbitten apple, he lay down decisively, and a sinuous shape rustled away through the grass to avoid his descending head. He placed his right wrist on the top button of his waistcoat, his hand pointing upwards to heaven like a white tower, and closed his eyes. He found his Centre.

There was someone else there.

"Hello," he said. "I'm the Doctor. What are you doing in my Centre?"

"Returning the favour," smirked the strange girl who floated above where his spirit lay.

She shone in the Doctor's mind, standing out against the dim, forgotten ruins which receded beyond perception into the shadows of the astral plane. She was clad all in white, with bright gems at her throat and around her waist, and long purple tresses flowing over her shoulders. He stared at her in amazement.

"This time your spirit-form is dark green," she remarked, looking at the colour of the frock coat he wore. "Almost black."

"I'm sorry – have we met before?"

"Of course we have. I'm Raven. You mean you don't remember?"

His astral body coughed with embarrassment.

"I'm afraid not. And, if you don't mind me saying so, I think I would remember you."

"Of course," she said, looking more closely, "I see now. You're missing something. It's as if there's less of you than there was before."

"Yes," he agreed. "I rather suspected that myself. You don't happen to know what it is that I've lost, do you?"

"Not really."

"Oh."

There was an interlude of silence.

"What is it you've come to see me about?" he eventually asked.

"I'm here to tell you what happened, on the night my father came, seeking to rule my world through me. I suppose you don't remember that, either?"

"Sorry."

"My father was Trigon the Terrible, and he sired me in order to use me as a portal into my world from Hell. Through me, when I came of age, he would take possession of everything; and he intended that his reign would never end."

"I see. That's terrible. But how was I involved?"

"Just before it all started, you came to visit me, on the astral plane. I told you what was going to happen, that my friends were going to die because of me. But all you would say to me was that I should fight, and win, and if I loved my friends, I should save them – as though you didn't understand that I was afraid, and lonely, and knew for a fact that I couldn't do what you said was simple. I was angry with you, hated you, although I didn't understand who or what you were."

"I came to you to say that? Was I really so cold?"

"Yes."

The Doctor's spirit sank under a fresh weight of sadness.

"Then I can understand why you've sought me out," he said. "Whatever you wish to do to me now, I will obviously have deserved. I only wish I could remember why."

"No," said Raven. "Because the story isn't over. I haven't told you about my friends."

"Your friends? Yes. Tell me about them."

"I had four friends with me on the night my father arrived. Robin, my best friend, my 'leader', in a way. He's a hero. He fights cruelty and injustice and monsters wherever he finds them, and he isn't afraid of anything. Starfire, a princess from an alien planet. How to describe her? She has the most beautiful soul of anyone I have ever met. And Cyborg, the wisest and cleverest of them all: when my enemies came for me, he fought the hardest. Oh, and finally Beast Boy. He's a shapeshifter who turns into animals, most of which stink. He's constantly making puerile jokes and is incapable of taking anything seriously."

The Doctor's face fell.

"I rather like the sound of this 'Beast Boy'. I wish you two got on better," he said, a little sadly.

"Oh no, Beast Boy is my favourite. But that's in strict confidence, on pain of death," she smiled, provoking him to smile back, understanding.

"These friends, then – you speak about them as though they're still alive. What happened to them, the night your father came?"

"They had to watch me die. And then they found themselves in the world my father ruled, a world where everyone except them had been killed, and which had become an image of the place he comes from; then they had to fight monsters which my father made to mock them, which looked like them and spoke with their voices, for his amusement. All except for Robin, who was travelling through deep Hell, searching for me. His only guide was a man who was already dead – and, what's more, was his oldest and greatest enemy."

"But Robin rescued you from Hell – in spite of such peril?"

"Yes, and brought me back to the upper world. And when we got there we all fought together, to try to overthrow my father and bring the world back to life, even though there seemed to be no hope. What do you think of the story now?"

"It's the most dreadful and wonderful I've ever heard," he exclaimed, with passionate intensity. "But that can't be the end. What happened next?"

"When I returned and saw what my friends had done, how they had fought and not despaired for me, I fought as well. I defeated my father, and destroyed all his power over me and my world, because that was the only way to save them. You said if I loved them, I should save them, that it was that simple – and you were right. It was that simple. I thought you were being cruel. But now I think you were wiser than I was."

They regarded each other for a long, timeless moment, her cool, purple eyes meeting his of wild blue. Then she began to fade.

"That's what I wanted to tell you," Raven said. "Goodbye. I hope you can rebuild what you've lost."

And she went.

# # # #

The Doctor returned, and found that it was late evening, and there was a stiffness in his limbs as he got to his feet. The apple he had thrown into the undergrowth was brown with several days' decay. His ship would have sailed: he would have to join a new one.

He stood still a while, thoughtful.

"So devils can be overthrown, sometimes," he mused, "by those who love bravely and well." He looked around him at the temple stones as they vanished in the sudden Southern nightfall, and felt a little less troubled. "That's good to know," he decided.

He picked up his violin and began the long walk back to the coast.


End file.
